Second Lines and Brass Bands Explained

On a Sunday afternoon in a New Orleans neighbourhood, a brass band strikes up on a street corner, a cluster of men and women in matching suits, sashes or parasols begins to dance behind it, and within a few minutes a crowd of neighbours has formed behind them, moving as one loose, joyful column down the block. This is a second line. It is one of the most alive things in the city, and one of the most widely misunderstood by visitors, who sometimes mistake it for a street performance staged for their benefit. It is not. It is a community’s parade, thrown by the community, for the community, and everything about how a visitor should approach it follows from that one fact.

What a second line actually is

The term “second line” describes both an event and the crowd that forms it. The parade itself is organised by a social aid and pleasure club — a community organisation, often more than a hundred years old, whose members spend an entire year planning, saving for and rehearsing a single annual procession through a chosen route in their neighbourhood. The club’s dressed and choreographed members, moving directly behind the brass band, are the first line. Everyone who falls in behind them — neighbours stepping off their porches, friends who came specifically for the day, and visitors who happen to be there — forms the second line, and it is this trailing, participatory crowd that gives the whole event its name.

The distinction matters because it describes ownership. The first line belongs to the club; the second line is open, but it is still their event, on their route, on their date, for their reasons. A visitor who understands this arrives as a guest joining someone else’s celebration, not as an audience member who bought a ticket.

Where the tradition comes from

Social aid and pleasure clubs trace back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Black New Orleanians were routinely excluded from insurance companies, hospitals and burial societies. Clubs formed to pool dues among members so that sickness, injury or death would not leave a family with nothing — mutual aid first, celebration second. The parade grew out of that same structure: an annual public procession celebrating the club’s membership, its history and its continuation, with music, dancing and elaborate coordinated outfits that club members design and pay for themselves, often over months.

That history is inseparable from the neighbourhoods where second lines still happen most often — Treme, the Seventh Ward, Central City, the Lower Ninth Ward — among the oldest and most historically significant African American communities in the country. A separate guide on this site covers Treme’s role as the birthplace of jazz and the historical arc that runs through Congo Square and Louis Armstrong Park; this page is about the living practice that continues today, on the street, not the origin story.

Brass bands as the backbone

If the social aid and pleasure club provides the reason for a second line, the brass band provides its sound and its momentum. A typical New Orleans brass band pairs a rhythm section — usually a bass drum and snare, sometimes a sousaphone doubling as the bass line — with trumpets, trombones and clarinets or saxophones layered on top, built to be played standing up and walking, loudly, for hours. The repertoire mixes traditional jazz standards, hymns, funk and contemporary songs, often reworked with the same syncopated, call-and-response feel that has defined New Orleans brass playing for well over a century.

Brass bands are not exclusive to second lines. The same tradition underpins the jazz funeral, in which a band accompanies mourners from a church or funeral home to the burial with slow, mournful dirges, then switches to upbeat, celebratory music once the burial is complete — a public expression of grief giving way to a public expression of life.

A second line parade is different in kind: it is planned well in advance as an annual celebration, not tied to a specific death, though it draws on exactly the same musical vocabulary and the same brass instrumentation. Readers curious about jazz as a nightly, indoor experience — clubs, listening rooms, ticketed shows — should look at the separate guide to live jazz in the city; what happens at a second line is the same musical family playing in an entirely different, outdoor, communal context.

The look of a second line: parasols, sashes and steps

Part of what makes a second line instantly recognisable, even from a block away, is its visual language. Club members typically coordinate an entire outfit for the day — matching suits or dresses in a colour chosen for that year, sashes, hats, and often hand-decorated parasols or handkerchiefs twirled overhead in time with the music. None of this is costume in the sense of disguise; it is closer to a uniform, designed, budgeted for and often sewn or customised by the members themselves months in advance, and different every year so that longtime followers of a given club can track its history season by season.

The dancing that goes with it has its own vocabulary too — a rolling, bent-knee strut with the parasol or handkerchief worked in loose circles above the head, sometimes low dips and struts that peel off from the main line and rejoin it a few steps later. Members who have paraded for years develop a personal signature within that shared vocabulary, and part of what a second line crowd is watching, and cheering, is exactly that: individual style expressed inside a collective tradition, not a routine everyone performs identically.

This visual and choreographic tradition did not appear in isolation. It shares roots and, in places, membership with the Mardi Gras Indian tribes who parade in elaborately beaded and feathered suits on Mardi Gras Day and on St Joseph’s Night, and it draws on the same African diasporic traditions of processional dance, call-and-response and communal celebration that also shaped jazz itself. A visitor who has spent time with the history covered in the African American heritage guide will recognise a second line’s outfits and steps as one more expression of that same continuous thread, not a standalone spectacle invented for the street.

A living tradition, not a museum piece

It is worth being explicit about why all of this still matters as a piece of practical travel advice rather than background colour. Second lines are, unlike almost everything else described in guides to this city, an active, present-tense community practice rather than a preserved or reenacted piece of heritage. The clubs that parade today are frequently the same organisations, sometimes bearing the same name, that were founded well over a hundred years ago for mutual aid, and many families follow the same club across generations, as members, as second-line dancers, or simply as neighbours who show up every year the parade passes their block.

That continuity is precisely what makes the etiquette above non-negotiable rather than a nicety. A museum exhibit does not mind being photographed at close range without acknowledgement; a hundred-year-old social aid and pleasure club, marking its year in front of its own neighbourhood, reasonably does. Visitors who keep that distinction in mind tend to come away from an encounter with a second line describing it as one of the most memorable things they saw in the city — not despite its being unscripted and unpolished for tourism, but because of it.

A neighbourhood event, not a show

The single most important thing to understand about a second line is what it is not: it is not a performance booked for tourists, not a re-enactment, and not a fixed daily attraction with a box office. It exists on its own calendar, set by each club, typically running from around September through June, skipping the hottest months. Routes and dates are announced by the clubs themselves and can change from year to year or even week to week. There is no single office selling tickets, because there is nothing to buy a ticket for.

This has practical consequences for a visitor. A second line cannot be reliably scheduled into a two-day itinerary the way a museum or a guided tour can. It may be happening on a given Sunday in a neighbourhood a visitor has no particular reason to be in, at a time that has nothing to do with anyone’s holiday. That unpredictability is not a flaw in the experience; it is the clearest sign that the event was never designed around a visitor’s convenience in the first place.

How to watch, if you find yourself at one

Coming across a second line, or deliberately going to watch one, is entirely possible to do well. The posture that works is the same posture that works at any event that belongs to someone else first: watch, enjoy, and stay conscious of whose celebration it is.

A few concrete habits follow from that:

• Stay behind or alongside the crowd rather than pushing toward the front, which belongs to the club’s own members.
• Let the music and the dancing set the pace; join in the walking and dancing of the second line itself if you like, but do not try to insert yourself into the first line’s choreography.
• Be thoughtful about photographing people up close, especially club members mid-performance; a friendly, brief acknowledgement goes further than a raised phone.
• Do not expect narration, explanation or a program — nobody is obligated to interpret the event for a visitor, and asking a stranger to pause and explain their neighbourhood’s celebration is an imposition, not a service.
• Accept that a parade may be rerouted, delayed or simply not be where you expected; there is no customer-service line to call.

None of this requires distance or wariness. Social aid and pleasure club parades are, by design, open and welcoming; the crowd behind the band is not screened at a door. The point is simply to remember that welcome and ownership are different things — a guest at a family celebration is welcome, and still a guest.

Second lines compared with other New Orleans traditions

Tradition	What it is	When it happens	Who it belongs to
Second line parade	Annual brass-band procession by a social aid and pleasure club	Sundays, roughly September to June, dates set by each club	The club and its neighbourhood
Jazz funeral	Brass-band procession accompanying a burial, dirge then celebration	Tied to an individual death, no fixed calendar	The deceased’s family and community
Nightly jazz venues	Ticketed or cover-charge indoor performances	Nightly, on a published schedule	Venues and touring or resident musicians
Mardi Gras parades	City-permitted parades by krewes, floats and marching bands	Carnival season, a movable window before Lent	Krewes, open to public viewing along set routes

The table makes the useful distinction plain: only the second line and the jazz funeral are rooted directly in a specific neighbourhood and a specific community organisation rather than a venue, a krewe structure or a booking calendar. That rootedness is exactly why the etiquette described above matters more here than almost anywhere else in the city.

Where second lines fit into a New Orleans visit

Because second lines cannot be scheduled to order, most visitors will not build a day around one; they will, if lucky, encounter one while exploring Treme or the neighbourhoods just north and east of the French Quarter. A guided walk through Treme and the origins of jazz gives useful grounding in the history behind the music before a visitor tries to make sense of the living practice on the street.

For the indoor, scheduled side of the city’s music, the guide to live jazz in New Orleans and the comparison of Frenchmen Street and Bourbon Street cover venues and nightly listening rooms, which operate on entirely different terms from a Sunday parade.

Anyone drawn to this subject because of the city’s African American history more broadly should also look at the dedicated guide to African American heritage in New Orleans, which places second lines and social aid and pleasure clubs within a much longer arc that includes Congo Square, the cemeteries of New Orleans, and the neighbourhoods of Treme and the Seventh Ward.

A small-group walking tour focused on the architecture and social history of the Marigny and Treme area, offered through a guided walk through the Marigny’s historic streets, can be a useful, respectful way to learn the neighbourhood context before or after encountering a second line, since it is led by someone grounded in the area rather than treating it as backdrop.

For visitors who want a wider orientation to the city before venturing into these neighbourhoods independently, a broad general city tour covering New Orleans’s historic districts or a three-hour overview tour of the city’s key sights can help place Treme, the Seventh Ward and Central City on the map relative to the Garden District and the French Quarter.

Visitors interested in the spiritual and historical undercurrents of these neighbourhoods, including figures such as Marie Laveau, may also want the separate guided tour exploring the city’s Voodoo history and traditions, which is covered in full in the dedicated Voodoo guide and the cemeteries guide — both separate subjects from the second line tradition, but part of the same living cultural fabric of the city’s older neighbourhoods.

The one thing to remember

A second line is not an attraction that exists because visitors want to see it; it is a neighbourhood celebration that visitors are permitted to witness. Brass bands supply its unmistakable sound, social aid and pleasure clubs supply its purpose and its history, and the street supplies its stage — never a hall, never a ticket booth, never a schedule built for tourism. Treat it accordingly: watch closely, listen well, stay out of the first line’s space, and leave having witnessed something that belongs, first and always, to the people who built it.